GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

I believe that before our society makes a big decision like whether to expand marriage to include same-sex couples, we need to consult every relevant discipline – psychology, history, biology, philosophy, sociology, and more. In my wide-ranging reading about same-sex marriage, I have never read an article that applies the skills of linguists to the issue, and that’s a shame – because linguistics has a lot to offer.

It is widely accepted that the way a language describes a phenomenon reveals the values and experiences of the culture that speaks it. For example, Estonian uses the same word, mägi, to mean both hills and mountains. I’m told that if I ever saw the landscape in Estonia, I’d understand why.

I’m fluent in Hebrew, a language that does not differentiate between liking and loving. Both are ahavah. That probably relates to the relatively low priority Judaism places on romantic love as compared to other cultures.

Serbian has only one word for church, but Polish has two – one meaning “Catholic or any other church” and one meaning “Orthodox church.” The difference may reflect attitudes toward minority Christian religions by the dominant groups in each society.

Finally, we all know that English has only one word for you, but the Japanese language, which is spoken in a nation obsessed with politeness, has thirty words for you.

So it is directly relevant to the issue we’ve been debating that it appears that every language in world history has had a different word for mother and for father. If a group speaking a particular language saw no particular distinction between parents of both sexes, it very well could have used a single word to mean “parent.” That appears to have never happened.

Dr. Jay Jasanoff, the chairman of the linguistics department at Harvard (yes, I said chairman, and yes, I said Harvard), told me he’s never encountered any language without a specific word for mother and a separate word for father. In fact, he said, he “would frankly be surprised if such a language existed.” Confirming his perspective is his colleague Dr. Patrice Speeter Beddor, who chairs the linguistics department at the University of Michigan. She said “All languages with which I am familiar, including languages from many different language families, have words for both mother and father.”

In addition, a professor at UC-Berkeley who asked to remain anonymous so he doesn’t offend his gay friends, said “I have never seen a language that does not have distinct terms for male parent and female parent…. This is the kind of thing that would make the rounds on the linguistic urban myth mill. ‘Say, I’m working in a language that doesn’t have a word for mother.’ I’ve never, in several decades in the field, heard anyone say such a thing.”

So?

Well the first thing we can conclude is that the notion that mothers and fathers provide nothing different for children, is a radical, even revolutionary notion in the context of world history. If not, at least a few of the more than 6,000 languages spoken would have only one word for parent. In my mind, that is sufficient reason to keep marriage between a man and a woman. But let’s say I’m wrong and there are other factors worthy of overriding the linguistic evidence that all cultures have always believed children get different things from their mothers and their fathers.

Nonetheless, do we really have enough evidence to declare that the old way, really the only way of every single culture in history through the very end of the 20th century, had a bigoted and offensive – rather than merely different – idea about children and parenting? Because that is the official policy of the first gay-marriage state, Massachusetts. If you want to run a Boston adoption agency, and to give just a slight preference – not an absolute one, but a tie-breaker preference – to families that provide both a mother and father, you cannot do so without being shut down by the government.

Even if the gay marriage movement has the preponderance of the evidence and is campaigning for the right thing to do, have they really proven their case so overwhelmingly that law enforcement should shut down the businesses of people who agree with with every single society in history until eight years ago?

There’s a word for folks like the gay and lesbian community, among whom I’m one of very few voices to have ever condemned the Massachusetts policy. It’s called arrogance. California voters will be able to decide in November whether to take the gay-marriage movement down a notch.